One issue of personal relevance to me would be gambling. Gambling because my dad likes to gamble a lot, though I don’t take that against him. I believe this action to be wrong, since general principles would say that it is wrong since it causes harm to oneself, and in some cases others as well.

I believe that there will always be a case when the action need not be considered bad or sinful. Let’s say a person enjoys playing, but does not really play so much. Gambling only does real harm when the bets become way too big. In that case when a person bets money minimal compared to his or her income, there really is no harm done to oneself. At the same time, there is also those criteria we consult. Knowledge, freedom and serious harm. Gambling is something done by considerably wealthy people only and there will almost always be adequate knowledge and adequate freedom on the part of the gambler. What makes the difference is the serious harm. Some gambles don’t really do serious harm to themselves or their family, while of course there would be some that gamble to the extent that they ruin their lives and those close to them. In that case it would already be a grave sin. However, in the case of those that gamble sparingly, it is not really a grave and sinful act. However it is still wrong.

I believe myself to be a moral rationalist since I take into consideration the situation. Although I have the tendency to see the general principles are being unnecessary, I’ve come to realize that the general principle is also important. However, I have to admit that I see the situation to bear a bit more importance than the general principle, not that I’m discounting the importance of the general principles.

When it comes to gambling, it’ll always be better to just not do it. Don’t even start because once you start it tends to get addicting. It doesn’t really matter if the general principles are true or not in this case, through mere reason alone you can already see the harm that gambling might do. You might win you might lose, but it’s always best to be cautious. You’re not sure it’s right or wrong, so just don’t do it, you have nothing to lose anyway. You might say that you can just gamble a bit, but then it can really get addicting so best to just stay out of it.

GMO’s, I may not know much about them but I can say that I don’t really have anything against them. The purpose of making GMO’s is to remove their bad traits and add new beneficial ones. So why be against them? They undergo testing and all that anyways the same way drugs are made. If the argument is that it’s going against nature and stuff, drugs should also be bad if looked at through this perspective. GMO’s make producing food more efficient and at the same time makes them more healthy.

Today in class we cooked KROPEK !!! Using different kinds of oil to “taste” the difference. Basically just to find out how much the kind of oil actually affects the taste.

I managed to try a lot from the butter kropek, to the olive oil, to the corn oil, to the vegetable oil. That’s really all cause I’m a bit of a health conscious person. Not too much a health freak since I give in to temptations a lot but I can manage it most of the time. To be honest the butter tasted the best to me, but that feeling of unhealthiness would often get in the way, at least for me. As usual of course the unhealthier one is more tasty, sad reality. But to be honest the difference isn’t really that much. Butter kropek isn’t really THAT much tastier than the olive oil or the corn oil. In the end they’re all just kropek to me so might as well go for the healthier one. At least that’s what I believe.

I think people consider these food weird because they are not mainstream. In the sense that people do not really eat often. What’s worse is that these aren’t seen in most parts of the world so most of these will be considered weird food.

Being weird food does not really discount the fact that they are food. I think food should be anything edible that fills you or provides energy, nutrients and all that. So long as there is a way to prevent it from being deadly and poisonous. Normal food would be the usual everyday food we eat such as rice and fish. Weird food would be those we don’t normally encounter such as the codfish sperms and the tarantulas. Who would want to eat a sperm or tarantula anyway.

The video conferenced earlier can be described very simply as being fun. The friendly faces that greeted us during the video conference certainly helped in making the conference very engaging. Of course it also helped that we talked a lot as well.

I suppose something I learned from this VC was how similar our cultures are really. Despite the long distance between the two countries, a lot of similarities arise. Of course, this might be a bit narrow, but maybe that’s just something a lot of us need to learn. Try to look at the similarities more than the differences because differences exist even amongst individuals of the same community.

The 3 most relevant lessons I recall, and in my opinion, are the Epistemological World Views, Social Justice (Circle of Faith in Action) and Perception towards other religions.

2 skills that I would say are quite important would be learning to converse with people of different religions and cultures, and learning to read the bible as literature.

I suppose my most significant insight would be related to Social Justice. There truly are a lot of problems in this world. A lot of things wrong with the way our society works. Most of us try our best to help, but something I learned is that everyone should play a part in helping to solve this problem.